The Right to Become a Parent Is Now at Risk Too

The Supreme Court may not realize it, but in overturning Roe v. Wade it would open up a horrifying and perhaps counterintuitive possibility that should repulse all admirers of liberty: the legality of forced abortion or sterilization. Just as a fetus is inextricably fused with the body of the person gestating it, if the Court erases Roe and thus obliterates the right not to beget and bear a child, it will inevitably erase its reflection: the right to bring a child into the world. If Roe was wrong, then decisions upholding mandatory sterilization and abortion would be right.

The practical and not merely theoretical nature of that of the constitutional right to an abortion in 1973 and of that right in 1992. Lower courts, including the Courts of Appeals for the Fourth and Eleventh Circuits, had during that period been confronted with repeated efforts by state officials, sometimes doing the bidding of teenage girls’ parents, to coerce their daughters into undergoing surgical abortions or sterilizations. The reasons offered ranged from feared birth defects to beliefs that their girls were not ready to be good mothers to disapproval of the fathers-to-be, although it’s hard not to suspect that domestic abuse and incest were sometimes lurking beneath the surface.